When the server is down, any company employee impacted by the service outage can cost that company hundreds of dollars an hour or more to sit idle waiting for things to come back online.

If a Cloud Service server is compromised or an error is made, as in the Google example, consideration of the possible ramifications to the business if its data gets out to competitors is important.

As a business owner, we need to ask the difficult questions before jumping in on anything new.

One of the questions to ask is, “how much does it cost my business for every minute of Cloud service downtime?”

In the case of QuickBooks Online, what happens if the service goes offline just before we need to generate our payroll?

Short of a dedicated and managed fibre link at a business site, which is prohibitively expensive here in Canada, what happens if the ISP connection goes down for an extended period of time?

The difficult questions always have to do with balancing the risks with the rewards.

For us, it means having a good understanding of our client’s business needs along with the value they place on their daily productivity and data security among other business process requirements.

With this understanding we can go through all of the options with our client or potential client to help them understand and weigh the risks and rewards to any in-house, hybrid, or Cloud Services based solution.

SUBSCRIBE

ABOUT

Our primary IT vertical is accounting firms since 1998. From accounting app support through to highly available solutions for accounting firms we've got it covered. I'm a Microsoft MVP since 2009. First on SBS and then starting in 2014 on Cluster.